.
summer night
a gunshot
interrupts the heat
.
first star
cell phone glowing
at the end of the dock
.
Presence 47
.
I thought it was time to haul out some of the warm-weather ku that I felt dumb posting during the winter. Yeah, I know that forty-five doesn’t really count as “warmer” to most people, but welcome to Wisconsin.
.
.
summer night
a gunshot
interrupts the heat
.
Presence 47
.
I grew up in Connecticut, which is a very small state. No place in Connecticut is more than a couple of hours away from anyplace else. I lived about forty-five minutes from Newtown. It was down the road. Every place in Connecticut is down the road from everyplace else. Most of Connecticut is a patchwork of small towns more or less like Newtown, all butting comfortably up against each other, breathing each other’s air, gossiping comfortably about each other. The towns are all old and comfortable in their own skin. They’re real places, not in-between places; organic places, not manufactured places. I was a child in one of those towns. I’ve never felt so safe since.
halfway through Advent
the latest explanation
for evil
.
.
Maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t that fewer haiku tend to be written about the summer than about any other season. (I have absolutely no hard data to support this conclusion. But I’ve got a whole theory about it, so work with me here.)
I mentioned this to a friend who is just becoming familiar with haiku.
— Autumn, I told him, that’s the haiku season. It’s more wabi-sabi. [Insert whole discussion about wabi-sabi.]
— Fine, he said, wabi-sabi away, but why autumn? Think outside the box here. Why can’t you be all imperfect and melancholic in the summer?
— Um, because it’s too sunny, I said. People are all warm and happy in the summer. They’re going to the beach, having barbecues. Nothing is dying. There’s nothing to be wistful about.
— Aha (he said triumphantly). But that makes the wistfulness more ironic and unexpected. It’s more interesting that way. You should write more haiku about the summer.
Hmmm. I suppose I should.
.
summer night
a gunshot separates
light from dark
.
the surgeon questions
my need to be awake —
summer downpour
.
slanted sunlight…
I say “I do”
in divorce court
.
glaring sun ::
his flawed logic
convinces me
.
across the lawn
a hose stretched taut–
summer dusk
..
a room full of mosquitoes in and out of love
.
.
.
one astronaut
takes another’s place…
summer stars
.
Presence 46, June 2012
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Kokako 16
.
.
.
_____________________________________________________________________
credits: spring rain, Modern Haiku 42.3; summer rain, Frogpond 35.1; autumn rain, Modern Haiku 43.1; winter rain, bottle rockets 26
..
It’s a tiny motel: four rooms, two tacked on to each end of our house like the spreading wings of a Southern plantation. But we’re the opposite of a plantation, we’re the site of endless uprootings. Poor soil for weak vegetation. The less successful variety of traveling salesman, in cheap suits, bearing leatherette briefcases and expressions of bewilderment at how fruitless their lives have turned out to be. Men who’ve been kicked out of the house by their wives and aren’t quite sure yet whether they can go home tomorrow. Drifters who’ve scrounged up enough money somewhere to settle down in one of our nineteen-dollar beds for the night, often leaving behind them the evidence that they had enough left over for a good-sized bender. Even hippies sometimes, though there aren’t a lot of them in this blue-collar, conservative town; maybe they’re just passing through on their way to someplace more congenial — a commune, a city squat, a rock festival. They arrive, unlike most of our customers, in clumps, too young yet to want or need or have to be alone. Most of these people don’t stay long; the wind blows them to us and then blows them away.
Then there’s Miss Knight. June comes and so does she, in her sky blue VW bus, crammed to the ceiling with everything she owns. All summer it sits in front of the motel, down by Room 4, which is her home for the summer and always has been. (As far as I know, anyway; my “always” isn’t very long.) She fills the room up quickly. She’s not the kind of wanderer who travels lightly, who pares down her possessions. She likes things. Not luxurious things but things that are her own, that make her feel at home. Her room feels like nothing so much as a nest, lined with bits of fluff and feathers and string, trifles that seem worthless on their own but make excellent insulation. She wears layers of clothing too, shapeless skirts and sweaters draped around her tiny thin body, even in the heat of summer. She coddles herself, but she thrives this way. Nothing blows her away; she’s rooted.
We don’t know how old she is. Seventy-five? Eighty-five? Her hair is pure white and scant, her spine bent, and sometimes her mind, to us, seems to travel on illogical paths — but maybe it’s our minds that are at fault, too limited to follow her flights of fancy, her mental travels into the less explored regions of the universe. She’s energetic, her eyes sparkle, she takes good care of herself and her dog, the Chihuahua that goes with her everywhere: so whatever age she is, it isn’t too old. We’re not inclined to be critical anyway; the place seems entirely different with her around, less like a dreary way station for the desperate, more like a bucolic paradise, a fit resting place for any respectable elderly woman who spends the year driving around New England in a VW bus. It never feels like summer until her bus arrives, to remind us that we have an acre of land out back, filled with fruit trees and shade trees and flowering bushes. Miss Knight takes daily constitutionals around it, looking at everything with appreciation and curiosity.
She’s friendly, even ebullient, but guarded. She looks hazy-eyed past questions. We don’t know her story, her past or her future. It’s as if she only exists here and now, in the summer in a small motel in Connecticut. The only indication we have of her life away from us is the one postcard that arrives every spring, in advance of her own arrival, letting us know to be on the lookout for her. It sits propped on the dining room table for weeks, while the weather grows warmer, the school year wears on, our other customers come and go, our own lives mutate and progress inexorably. It’s our surrogate for her; we read it over and over, day by day, until she pulls into the driveway again, and then we put it away in a drawer with the ones from every other year.
The year it doesn’t arrive, we all start wondering whether we’re any more real than she is.
summer solstice
how much of my life story
is invented
.
Haibun Today 5:3, September 2011
.
My kindergarten teacher was worried about me because I liked to read. In those days kindergarteners were supposed to occupy themselves only with playing, and socializing, and coloring in the letters of the alphabet on worksheets just to familiarize themselves with the shapes that they would be introduced to more thoroughly in first grade. But I could already read and I was tantalized by the books on the shelves behind the teacher’s desk, which she read aloud to us before naptime. When the teacher’s back was turned I scrambled up on a stepstool and grabbed books and ran off with them to a corner to devour them before she could find me and take the books away and scold me for reading and send me back to play with dolls or something else I had no interest in. I felt like a criminal. I felt like a rebel. I felt like a five-year-old who was sick with love for stories and kept having her heart broken, day after day, by never being able to find out what the ending was.
Sometimes I dreamed the endings. Sometimes I wonder whether my own endings or the real ones were more satisfying.
first day of school —
out of time to decipher
the cicada’s drone
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Haiku, Tanka, Haiga From All Over
I broke one of my own unwritten rules this edition. I usually try not to feature more than one poem per poet per edition, but I nearly went mad deciding which of the below three haiku by Johannes S.H. Bjerg I should include, so in the end I said the hell with it and decided to inflict them all on you. Please address any complaints to my alter ego, Ms. I.N. DeCision.
.
still air –
will a dead butterfly
become a butterfly?
stille luft –
vil en død sommerfugl
blive til en sommerfugl?
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
swallows leaving youshouldhavesaidsomething
svalerne forsvinder duskullehavesagtnoget
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
yoshino cherry tree—
it was never a question
of if
— Johannes S. H. Bjerg, Tinywords
.
high heat index–
my mosquito bite
the size of a fat raindrop
— Kathy Nguyen, Origami Lotus Stones
.
off key crooning
in the darkness:
a neighbor braces for fall
— Gene Myers, genemyers.com
.
All I can do
most days
is point and say
this
this
— Kris Lindbeck, haiku etc.
.
pale moon—
sugar crystals travelling
south
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
.
eastern daylight time
she leaves
another voicemail
(this is a wonderful haiga; please go check it out)
— Angie Werren, feathers
.
from the beginning —
the moon &
love note after love note
— Patricia Nelson, Moon Viewing Party, Haiku Bandit Society
.
広島や卵食ふとき口ひらく 西東三鬼
hiroshima ya tamago kû toki kuchi hiraku
Hiroshima—
to eat an egg
I open my mouth
— Sanki Saito, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
Fay’s Note: This haiku does not have a kigo, but it is one of 8 haiku titled ‘Famous City’ by Sanki Saito (1900-1962). Soon after an atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, Sanki visited the city. When he started to eat a boiled egg for lunch, he noticed that was the first time he opened his mouth that day. He had been speechless with what he saw.
.
wet rain . . .
you keep telling me things
i already know
[Modern Haiku 40.1]
— David Caruso, DavidHaiku.com
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Web Wide World
I’m just going to snap a bunch of links at you real quick like a bunny with a minimum of commentary because, you know, school’s starting soon and I should be doing stuff like buying textbooks and notebooks and sharpening my pencils and polishing shiny red apples to put on the desks of all my professors on the first day so they will be favorably disposed toward me and hopefully forgive me for scribbling haiku in the margins of all my notebooks around my notes on Electronic Resource Management. Ready? Here we go.
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A Brief Survey of Senryu by Women, by Hiroaki Sato
This essay, published in Modern Haiku 34.1 in spring 2003, first makes a quick stab at trying to define how senryu differs from haiku, with a note that “the senryû is expected to deal with matters of human and social nature, often in a playful, satirical, or knowing manner” but also acknowledging that the line between haiku and senryu these days can be blurry in the extreme. Most of the piece, however, is taken up by samples of modern (mainly twentieth century) senryu by Japanese women, which are absolutely fascinating — not least because many of them make no attempt to be funny at all, in fact can be quite serious, and I suspect would not be considered senryu by most American haiku poets. They are powerful, compelling poetry, however, and I keep coming back to read them over and over. They seem to me to painfully and eloquently express the difficulties and limitations of many women’s lives.
.
The moment it blooms with full force it’s cut
— Inoue Noboku
.
The snow’s falling the snow’s falling these two breasts
— Kuwano Akiko
.
He leaves and I put away the lonesome sound
— Saigo Kanojo
.
Okay, so here’s something that’s genuinely funny. One workshop I was sorry I had to miss at Haiku North America was Jessica Tremblay’s session about her well-known “Old Pond” comics based on haiku. The next best thing, though, was discovering that Jessica had drawn a series of strips about her experiences at HNA. I laughed and laughed with recognition at so many of these and if you were there, or have read my reports from the conference, I guarantee you will get at least a chuckle out of them as well.
.
Another HNA connection: After I saw Eve Luckring’s amazing presentation on video renku at HNA I came home and Googled her straight off because I had to know more about her work, and discovered her astounding website, filled with her photography, short films, art, and poetry, which are often combined in wildly imaginative and original ways. Please go explore, you’ll be happy you did.
.
A funny and fascinating article by Marlene Mountain on English haiku poetics vis-a-vis Japanese haiku poetics made the rounds of Facebook a couple of weeks ago, provoking lots of interesting discussion: The Japanese Haiku and So On, first published at Paul Conneally’s haikumania (which is worth a look around) in 2004.
.
re zen. whatever.
— Marlene Mountain
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If you haven’t discovered the “Montage” archive at The Haiku Foundation website, you need to run right over there and check it out…for about nine months in 2009 Allan Burns put together this fascinating weekly gallery of haiku, each week featuring haiku by three different poets on a different theme. The whole thing has been turned into a book now which can be yours for a $50 donation to The Haiku Foundation, but while you’re saving up for that, you can download each week’s gallery as a PDF and enjoy yourself mightily reading some amazing poetry.
.
Charlotte DiGregorio is the Midwest Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America, which is my region and so I get to benefit from her energy and organizational ability as she organizes so many enjoyable and successful events for us here in flyover land. She also has a blog on which she posts many interesting musings about haiku. Quite often she invites audience participation and recently she sent out an email soliciting answers to the question, “Why do you write haiku?” The answers she got back were thoughtful, often funny, usually thought-provoking, and all over the map: well worth reading. Check them out.
.
Roadrunner published a new issue a couple of weeks ago, which besides being, as usual, one of the most thought-provoking reads in the Haikuverse, is also graphically appealing this time around. Every ku is enclosed in a box with a background of a different color and with a different typeface, and with the author’s name left off — only to appear at the end of the issue in a box matching the color and typeface of his or her contribution(s). (Full disclosure: I have a ku in this issue, in a highly appropriate color, but I’m not gonna tell you what it is.)
I don’t usually think of myself as someone who is overly influenced by the famous “fourth line” in haiku, but I was amazed at how different an experience it was to read these poems without knowing who had written them. I had to force myself not to keep scrolling to the end to read those names. But I ended up wishing that more journals would do something similar. See how you feel.
.
And finally, here’s an announcement for what promises to be an exciting new online journal, A Hundred Gourds:
The editorial team of ‘A Hundred Gourds’ welcomes your submissions to our first issue, which will be published online in December, 2011. ’A Hundred Gourds’ is a new journal featuring haiku, haibun, haiga, tanka, resources (articles, commentaries, reviews and interviews) and special artwork. ’A Hundred Gourds’ is managed by its editorial team: Lorin Ford, Melinda Hipple, John MacManus, Gene Murtha and Ray Rasmussen. Ron Moss will continue to support us in his valuable role of contributing and consulting artist. We are dedicated to producing a high quality journal, and look forward to your submissions. Books for review (hard copy only) may be sent to John McManus or the haiku, tanka, haiga or haibun editor respectively.
Submissions for the first issue of ‘A Hundred Gourds’ close on September 15th, 2011. Submissions and enquires may be addressed to : Lorin Ford, Haiku Editor: haikugourds@gmail.com ; Melinda Hipple, Haiga Editor: haigagourds@gmail.com ; John McManus, Resources Editor: jmac.ahgjournal@gmail.com ; Gene Murtha, Tanka Editor: tankagourds@gmail.com ; Ray Rasmussen, Haibun Editor: haibungourds@gmail.com, ray@raysweb.net
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Dead Tree News
Once again, lots of print, little time.
.
Journals: Bottle Rockets, Ribbons
I love both these journals and you should too and here are some examples of why:
.
From Bottle Rockets 25:
.
was it the dark
we shared
or the candle
— Susan Marie La Vallee
.
wet bike seat
not everything
must be a poem
— Lucas Stensland
.
here with me distant train
— John Hawk
.
a low stone wall
neatly topped with snow
this happiness
— Bruce Ross
.
sitting out
on the concrete path
that summer
very still with ants crawling
over my skin I did feel loved
— Joey Jenkins
.
And also in this issue of Bottle Rockets, you must read the wonderful anthology/essay by Michael Fessler, Remarkable Haiku, a collection of the author’s favorite haiku with trenchant commentary on what makes them so memorable for him.
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From Ribbons 7:2, Summer 2011:
.
outside, the crickets
continue to sing,
though they would
never think of it
as singing
— Rosemary Wahtola Trommer
.
oh the places
we’ll go
rather than go
straight to the place
we’re all going
— John Stevenson
.
snow melt —
watching the world
shrink back
to its
usual proportions
— Paul Smith
.
.
Books: Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks (Fay Aoyagi); Where I Leave Off/Waar Ik Ophoud (Jim Kacian); Penguins/Pingviner (Johannes S.H. Bjerg)
I’m slowly working my way through the stacks of haiku books I bought this summer: first at Gayle Bull’s amazing bookshop in Mineral Point, Wis., The Foundry Books, which may have the best haiku book selection in the United States and is, terrifyingly, located only an hour from my house; second at Haiku North America. I’ll start with a couple of little books (little only in the physical sense) because somehow that makes them seem less intimidating, although on the inside they are as big as any haiku book ever written.
.
Fay Aoyagi’s third collection of poetry, Beyond the Reach of My Chopsticks, is as thrilling as her first two, Chrysanthemum Love (2003) and In Borrowed Shoes (2006), and is even more thrilling for the fact that it includes extensive excerpts from both these books as well as a large selection of new poetry. Fay manages to employ fairly traditional haiku aesthetics — kigo, kire — in the service of extremely striking and original images and ideas, often funny and subversive.
.
cauliflower —
another day without
an adventure
forced hyacinth
a congresswoman
steals my pen
July Fourth
he criticizes my graceless use
of chopsticks
in the pool
she sheds everything
she wants to shed
soft rain
a plum tree
in its third trimester
— Fay Aoyagi
.
Jim Kacian’s Where I Leave Off is both a collection of one-line haiku and an examination of the poetics of one-line haiku: When and why do they work? He briefly describes various one-line techniques (these were also the subject of the talk by Jim I attended at HNA) and gives numerous striking examples from his own work.
1. “One-line one-thought”: “Rather than a piling up of images upon the imagination, a single image is extended or elaborated into a second context, stated or implied.”
reading the time-travel novel into the next day
— Jim Kacian
2. “Sheer speed”: “The rushing of image past the imagination results in a breathless taking in of the whole…”
in this way coming to love that one
— Jim Kacian
3. “Multiple kire”: “The advantage of one-line poems is that any of several stops can be made by the reader, and a different stop each time.”
where the smoke from a chimney ends infinity
— Jim Kacian
4. And then there’s “one-bun”: “a haibun where the prose element must be contained in a single line.”
the second week
traveling by myself i cross the continental divide, and everything that once ran in one way now runs in another, down and down
on the surface of dark water my face
— Jim Kacian
.
When Johannes S.H. Bjerg’s (yes, him again) new chapbook, Penguins/Pingviner, appeared in our mailbox last week, there was much rejoicing in our household, since we are all both rabid penguin fans (no, not fans of rabid penguins, for goodness’ sake) and also staunch Johannes fans. So we sat around the kitchen table reading and laughing and musing philosophically. Go ahead, try it.
.
on the backside
of the moon
lurking penguins
.
penguins walking
the need for bridges
of chrome and sugar
.
penguins —
no respect for
top brands
.
sleeping
in softdrink vending machines
guerilla penguins
.
hole in the sky
penguins knead a blue scarf
into a human
.
penguins
believe willingly
in all things flying
.
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg
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.
And on that note… I think I’m going to drift off to sleep now, off to the far reaches of the Haikuverse, where the penguins fly and no one ever makes you stop reading just when you get to the good part. You’re welcome to join me, that is, when you’ve finished reading everything I tell you to. What, you thought you were gonna get out of doing your homework? Think again, kids.
.
I’ve been sick with a few different things over the last few weeks. Spent a lot of time lollygagging around in bed. Seem to be getting better now. Still don’t feel much like writing.
Somebody want to comment and let me know what you’re writing these days? It might make me feel better to know that someone in the world is not experiencing a creative slump.
Of course, there are all those people I quote down below. They seem to be doing just fine. Terrific, in fact. There are some spectacular images here. Some precise and lovely language. Some mind-altering revelations.
All of these poems are ones that made me step back when I saw them and go, “Whoa.” And then just breathe for a while, and read the poem again a few times, and feel really thankful I’d seen it.
In case you were wondering what my criteria were for choosing poems for this feature…that’s pretty much it. If a poem seems to me to be saying something that no one else in the world ever had or could say better…it’s going in.
It’s interesting to me, now that I’ve been reading haiku for a while, and have become familiar with the work of so many poets, how even in a form as short and relatively prescribed in form and content as the haiku (or tanka), there is such a wild and woolly assortment of styles possible and extant.
Reading the poems of people whose work you know and love is a little bit like looking at the faces of people you know and love: so familiar, and utterly unique, and the uniqueness makes you love them even more. You smile when you see them and say, “Oh, yes, that couldn’t possibly be anyone but [for instance] John Martone.”
Yes, I’m feeling much better now. Thanks.
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Poetry To Which Attention Must Be Paid
.
.
yes, this one,
gently close the humidor
– the smell of cedar
both dogs whining in the hall
eager to join me outside
—Steve Mitchell, Heed Not Steve
.
.
sun between clouds
the flies on a dead bird
flash blue
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
grandma’s well
the water tasted like iron
and cold—
that darkness
from which I’m made
— Charles Easter, Tinywords
.
.
物容るゝ壜も物言ふ壜も夏 中村安伸
mono iruru bin mo mono iu bin mo natsu
.
a jar to keep things
and a jar which speaks
summer
— Yasunobu Nakamura, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
wishing on the first star for the last time … mockingbird’s song
— Terri L. French, The Mulling Muse (Please go check out Terri’s wonderful haiga associated with this poem)
.
.
white sky –
the absent wind
with a girl’s name
.
hvid himmel –
den fraværende vind
med et pigenavn
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
.
feeling it
not feeling it
the grasshopper
between my hands
— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
.
.
wind
thru
pines
thru
sleep
— John Martone, originally published in Lilliput Review and quoted on Don Wentworth’s Issa’s Untidy Hut
.
.
everything I see
I am…
autumn moon
— Paul Smith, winner of the 2011 Haiku Pen Contest sponsored by Lyrical Passion E-Zine
.
Delicious Bloggy Goodness
Since I am giving this talk next week about blogging I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a good blog and which blogs I am devoutly grateful for (there are a lot of them). I mentioned a few in the last Haikuverse and here are a few more.
1. Kuniharu Shimizu, whose haiga on see haiku here are a marvel of nature most of the time anyway, has been posting some mind-blowing “linked haiga” lately. They’re like haiku sequences, except…they’re haiga sequences, and they are linked not only thematically but graphically. I’m just gonna stop trying to describe them now and order you to go look at them. My favorites are:
Haiku by A.C. Missias, Joann Klontz, and paul m.
Haiku by Cor van den Heuvel and Taneda Santoka
Haiku by Michael McClintock and Taneda Santoka
2. The fascinating people over at Icebox recently took a poll about which characteristics participants considered essential to haiku. Of a long list of possibilities, you were allowed to choose three. Now they have revealed and analyzed the results of some 104 responses, and it’s a fascinating read, especially if like me you find numbers a welcome break at times from all those words we’re always bandying about.
Full disclosure: I participated in this poll, and I am (I guess?) relieved to find out that my top three choices are identical to the top three vote-getters in the poll. Either I have a vague idea what I’m doing, or I just like to be exactly like everyone else. I haven’t decided yet.
3. Over at Morden Haiku, Matt Morden’s long haibun about his cycling tour of Scotland with his 18-year-old daughter (it was a school-leaving present) had me captivated every step of the way, which surprised me because I normally have very little interest in travelogue haibun. But Matt is so good at painting images in both prose and poetry. And he managed to capture the nature of the bond between him and his daughter without any overt description of it or any sentimentality.
at the end of a day
when I could not ask for more
wild orchids
— Matt Morden, Morden Haiku
4. At La Calebasse, Vincent Hoarau has written a moving and perceptive essay about the work of Svetlana Marisova, an excellent haiku poet from New Zealand. Unfortunately for many of you, it’s in French; fortunately for those same people, he quotes Svetlana’s haiku in English (as well as in his own French translation), so at least you can read those, and Svetlana’s haiku are must-reads.
I can’t really translate French so I wouldn’t inflict my garbled version of Vincent’s essay on you, but I will briefly quote one of his descriptions of Svetlana’s characteristic style, which “depends on the juxtaposition of images, on allusion, suggestion, and concision.” This might be a description of all or most good haiku, but it is true that there is more of a sense of mystery and a deeper resonance to Svetlana’s haiku than to most.
This makes it all the more painful to have to report that Svetlana has an aggressive form of brain cancer, for which she is currently being treated in Russia. I think it’s safe to say that everyone who knows Svetlana and her work is keeping her in their thoughts these days.
wintry sky …
these dark tumours
draining light
.
ciel hivernal … / ces tumeurs noires / drainant la lumière
— Svetlana Marisova, French translation by Vincent Hoarau
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Essaying: Words, Words, Words
The last few weeks I kept stumbling across, or getting pointed toward, thought-provoking essays about haiku, many of which I kept constantly open as tabs in my browser so I could reread them or bits of them at stray moments when, say, Facebook was failing to completely capture my attention. After a while (sometimes I’m slow) I started to notice a common theme between several of these essays: Words.
No, I don’t mean that they all contain words. I mean that they all deal in one way or another with the inadequacy of mere words to convey the meaning of haiku, with the fact that in haiku it is just as often what is not said that is important. That space, wordlessness, ma … there are so many ways people have tried to explain this notion of the open-endedness of haiku, the sense of possibility it offers the reader. But these three essays have a lot to contribute to this conversation.
Ian Marshall and Megan Simpson, in an often dense discussion of the literary theory of deconstructionism as it pertains (or doesn’t pertain) to haiku, spend a lot of time trying to decide whether the words in haiku can be trusted: whether they are revealing some kind of absolute truth or faithful depiction of the world, or whether they are saying more about the mind of their author than about any objective reality.
“What I’m getting at, what I’ve been getting at, is that the supposed ideal of ‘wordlessness’ of haiku, meaning that its language can represent the natural world in such a way that it becomes fully present in language, in seventeen syllables or less, is a fiction. But the best haiku are aware of the fiction and of the difficulty or impossibility of using words to achieve no-mind, or selflessness, or wordlessness. Bringing deconstruction to bear on haiku reveals that even haiku to some extent concern themselves with the problematics of representation, and recognizing this enriches our readings of haiku.”
— Ian Marshall and Megan Simpson, “Deconstructing Haiku: A Dialogue“
Randy Brooks, in a long and rich interview with Robert Wilson in the most recent issue of the journal Simply Haiku, elaborates on his vision of haiku poetics, which considers the reader to be “co-creator” with the writer of the meaning of the haiku.
“Haiku is not a closed form of verse with three lines of five-seven-five syllables, self-contained and finished by the author. Haiku is an open form of poetry in which the silences before, within and after the haiku resonate with surplus meaning. Basho called this surplus of meaning ‘yojô.’ These unfinished silences are deliberately left open to the reader, so that the reader can enter into the imagined space of the haiku as a co-creator with the author to discover the feelings, thoughts, insights, and overall significance of the haiku. This surplus meaning is shared by the writer and reader, with a playful variety of unpredictable responses. In my opinion, this is the primary joy of haiku—the writer has crafted a haiku as a creative response to nature, reality, dreams, art, imagination, or to other haiku, and the reader gets to enter into that playful haiku with his or her own creative response and imagination.”
— Randy Brooks, interviewed by Robert Wilson in Simply Haiku
And Fay Aoyagi, in a fascinating essay about the history of the moon in haiku, talks about the necessity for subtlety and ambiguity in haiku, the need to leave things out. (The first paragraph of her essay is not specifically about this idea, but it was too wonderful not to quote here.)
“If somebody asked me to choose between the sun and the moon as a place to live, I would choose the moon. In my mind, there are highways with 10 lanes on the sun, but the moon has alleys and narrow streets I can explore on foot. For me, the sun is a destination, but the moon is a gateway and a peep-hole to an unknown world. …
“One of my Japanese friends told me that she did not understand how people write haiku in English. According to her, Japanese culture, including haiku, is very subtle. She said Japanese is a more ambiguous language than English; it is a more suitable language to express feelings. Writing in Japanese, a poet can avoid too much explicitness. I am not sure I totally agree. I think English haiku can be very suggestive, as well. … Haiku is a poetry form which requires reading between the lines. I strongly believe that we can achieve subtlety in English.”— Fay Aoyagi, “Moon in the Haiku Tradition“
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Well. I think in this edition I’ve had more of a sense than most of actually going somewhere, of making some kind of journey.
I can’t help thinking back to when I first started this blog, with a light-hearted, innocent notion that I would be spending a few minutes every day composing these charming little poems. And then…the deluge.
After just a few days of surfing erratically around the Interwebs, I began to realize that the well I had fallen into was deeper and had far more at the bottom of it than I had dreamed.
I was stunned by the richness of so much of the haiku I had found, by how different it was than the haiku I had previously seen or imagined.
I was amazed by the amount and variety of writing about haiku that I discovered, and by the amount of disagreement that existed about what exactly haiku was anyway, and by the quality and profundity of thought that so many poets and scholars poured into these tiny poems.
I had a sense of having found another country. And I knew almost immediately that it was one I wanted to emigrate to permanently, and spend a lifetime exploring.
Well, why not? The scenery is astounding, the population is warm and welcoming, the cultural traditions … well, I need say no more. But sometimes I just kind of look around and think, Wow. I am so lucky to be here.
Thank you for being here too.
Dear _______,
In this edition of the ________ you will find many ________ and __________. My favorite is probably the ________ by __________. I hope you ________ this post. It took me a long time to ______ it and now I’m really ______.
This week I have been ______ing and _______ing. _________ are blooming in my yard. I saw ________ the other day for the first time in a while and got very _______. I spent about _______ hours watching them hoping I would be able to write a good _______ about them, but no luck so far.
Hope you’re having a good _______. I’ve been kind of ________ myself.
Always nice to ________ with you,
Melissa
_________________________________________________________
Haiku (Etc.) For You
It’s fascinating to me how in every edition of the Haikuverse the haiku seem to clump themselves into themes, with very few haiku left off by themselves. I don’t know if this is because haiku do tend to be written about a fairly narrow set of subjects, or because human beings are really good at seeing patterns where there aren’t necessarily any, or both, or what. But this time I’m starting off with four haiku about various insects and ending with three haiku about debris, gravel, and pebbles. With rain and toys and lilacs holding down the fort in the middle, staunchly independent.
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larva and silkworm-
once upon a time
there was a girl
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
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身のなかのまつ暗がりの蛍狩り 河原枇杷男
mi no naka no makkuragari no hotaru-gari
.
pitch darkness
inside of me
my firefly hunt
— Biwao Kawahara, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
what does the wasp
know about the blossoms —
windfall apples
— Polona Oblak, Crows & Daisies
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monkey cage
a butterfly drifts
in and out
— Laura Garrison, DailyHaiku
(Actually, I had a hard time picking just one from Laura’s seven haiku on DailyHaiku last week. It was an outstanding selection of original, thought-provoking haiku. If you don’t believe me, you can look for yourself.)
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toys my father
couldn’t fix . . .
summer rain
— Aubrie Cox, Yay words!
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scent of lilac –
one final breath
after another
— Paul Smith, Paper Moon
(Last week Paul celebrated acquiring the 100th follower on his blog. Really, he should have a lot more. Paper Moon is a must-read. Did you hear me? Must. Read. Go. Now.)
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Summer clouds,
how fast they build up
over fields of debris
— Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
.
yard gravel –
I build a demanding religion
from popsicle sticks
.
havegrus –
jeg bygger en krævende religion
af ispinde
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues . 2 tunger
.
beneath me
pebbles congregate
expectantly
— Philip Damian-Grint, a handful of stones
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Cool Things You Can Do With Blogs: A List
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1. You can write haiku and post it. Then you can add two lines to the haiku and turn it into a tanka and post that too. That’s what Angie Werren is doing this month on feathers. (And I thought she couldn’t top last month.) More people should do this. It makes me happy.
summer pond
her body slipping
through the fog
I bookmark pages
with birthday photos
—Angie Werren, feathers
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2. You can take other people’s fantastic haiku and turn them into digital works of art and post them on your blog. Then you can ALSO post a link to a great essay about haiku that is connected in some way to the haiku you posted, as well as an excerpt from the essay that will tempt your readers to go read it right now. You can do this every day for a month and call this brilliant feature “Spliced In.” If you do this, you will be Gillena Cox and your blog will be Lunch Break and it will be July 2011. And you will be one of my favorite people.
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inte ett ljud hörs —
den nytjärade ekan
slukas av natten
.
Without a sound
the fresh-tarred rowing-boat
slips into the dark
— Johan Bergstad, Sweden
(To get the full effect you must go see what Gillena has done with this.)
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3. You can write a series of brief, thoughtful, perceptive commentaries about individual haiku in simple, clear prose. This will make everyone happy, because there are not enough of these. From what I’ve seen so far, Jim (Sully) Sullivan’s new blog, haiku and commentary and tales, will be an excellent and much-needed addition to the Haikuverse. I’ve included a brief excerpt from one of his most interesting commentaries below.
soldier unfolding the scent of a letter
— Chad Lee Robinson
“A quick read and you think a soldier is unfolding a scented letter from a girl friend. … But on another level the haiku could be read as two distinct images.
soldier unfolding
the scent of a letter
… The beauty of this haiku is in the many interpretations. And the one line format (monostich) enhances this ambiguity; it leaves no clues to image breaks.”
— Jim Sullivan, “Soldier unfolding“
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Cool Things You Can Do With Websites: Another List
1. You can be Haiku Chronicles. I have written about them before but I should keep reminding you that there is a website devoted to podcasts about haiku. And if you have not listened to any of them, say while you’re chopping leeks a la Basho or staring at cobwebs deciding not to dust them a la Issa, then why are you wasting your time reading this when you could be doing that? Go. The latest installment is Anita Virgil (on whose haiku I have a massive crush) reading the fourth in her series of essays on the four great masters of haiku: Basho, Buson, Issa, and now … ladies and gentlemen … for your edification and entertainment … Shiki.
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2. You can be Bob Lucky. Okay, okay, most of us can’t be Bob Lucky, but at least we can go read Bob Lucky and the 25 tanka prose by other people that Bob Lucky (who is one of the most talented and, um, fun writers of haiku and tanka and haibun and tanka prose out there) lovingly selected for a special feature over at the website of the tanka journal Atlas Poetica. Not only are the tanka prose themselves more than worth reading, but Bob’s introductory essay on the selection and editing process is one of the most frank, funny things I’ve ever read on the subject.
“I never wanted to be an editor. I wanted to be a lumberjack. Not really, but there were days when working on this project I would wander from room to room, occasionally picking up a ukulele and singing momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be editors, while my mind wrestled with choices I had to make.”
— Bob Lucky, “TP or not TP, That is the Question“
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Dead Tree News: Dead Tree Journals
What showed up in my mailbox the last couple of weeks and made me very happy. I may be a bit telegraphic here because it’s late and words are starting to fail me (or I’m starting to fail them). Just imagine I had something more profound and appreciative to say about both these publications, because I do, it’s just kind of trapped in a yawn at the moment.
Presence
Out of the U.K., glossy cover, haiku arranged thoughtfully by season (including a non-seasonal section). There are tanka and haibun too. And reviews. It’s good, you should get it.
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all the bones
scattered in the cave
imagining God
— Bob Lucky
[See? I told you.]
hand-thrown
another bowl for fruit
I’ll never taste
— Thomas Powell
last night of September
a tear darkens
the facial mud pack
— Maeve O’Sullivan
winter closing in…
I visit the simplest words
in the dictionary
— Philip Rowland
holiday snapshots —
all the years
I was invisible
— Johannes Bjerg
.
red lights
A tanka journal, tall and thin and, naturally, red. Nice paper, nice print, pleasant to hold and look at and, oh, yes, read.
.
summertime
a boy leans over
a riverbank
with a foot raised
over the world
— David Caruso
some nights
someone screamed
for us all
in the dark
down the hall
— Susan Marie LaVallee
a stranger
to the sound of my voice
on a recording;
are there other parts of me
that people know and I don’t?
— Adelaide Shaw
________________________________________________________________
Okay, back to ________. I still have to ________ that _________ about the ________, prepare my ________ for _________, and ________. Hope you have a great ________!
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.
The first day of summer, and already I’m wondering where the summer went. It was a day that skittered between sunshine and rain, not fulfilling any promises. In the evening the sky turned green for a while and we kept an ear out for the tornado siren. Some lazy thunder rumbled by. I remembered later that I’d forgotten to eat for most of the day. It hadn’t seemed necessary, the way it never seems necessary in dreams. Around bedtime I finally got around to asking my husband where the rosebush that had suddenly appeared on our doorstep a couple days earlier had come from.
.
that shade of pink
I wonder if I’m
blushing too
.
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Haikai That Caught My Eye
Wow, people were writing haiku on a wide variety of subjects the last couple of weeks. Underwear and the universe and tomatoes and dinosaurs…maybe I am dreaming after all.
.
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I am alone
for week-long Spring rains
singing loudly to
the computer screen just how much
you are my sunshine
— Donna Fleischer, word pond
.
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housework
an old song in my head
over and over
— Catherine J.S. Lee, Mann Library Daily Haiku
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森のごときをんなが眠る夏電車 平井照敏
mori no gotoki on’na ga nemuru natsu-densha
.
a woman looking like
a forest sleeps
summer train
— Shobin Hirai, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
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universe
a collection of numbers
that rhyme
— Rick Daddario, 19 Planets (this is a great haiga, go take a look)
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— Aditya Bahl, dipping butterflies
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tomato—
sometimes even stars are not
enough
— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
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temporary relief –
while the pears ripen
I’m stuck on Earth
midlertidig lettelse .
mens pærerne modnes
sidder jeg fast på Jorden
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, 2 tongues/2 tunger
.
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January thaw—
the garden exposed
to my dreaming
— Adelaide B. Shaw, DailyHaiku
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what they tell us
about the war
ornamental poppies
— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
step back into the fragrance our histories mingling
— Susan Diridoni, Issa’s Untidy Hut, Wednesday Haiku
.
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not awake enough
to turn the swifts’ chitterings
into a haiku
— Patti Niehoff, a night kitchen
.
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incessant rain
falling on ferns and dinosaurs and
on my eyelids
— Taro Kunugi, quoted on Donna Fleischer’s word pond
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.
cicada song
the cat stalks
fat robins
— Angie Werren, feathers
The epigram to this haiku: ““There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
This is part of Angie’s unbelievably cool project this month to combine NaHaiWriMo prompts with random Shakespeare quotations…what? How does she think of these things? Who cares — just go check it out, it will blow your mind.
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________________________________________________________________
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Journaled
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A bunch of journals came out this week that I hadn’t seen before and was mightily impressed with, like for instance…
Lishanu: an interlingual haiku journal
Online journal, full of, oh joy, oh bliss, haiku in multiple languages, all translated into English. Or vice versa. You know what I mean.
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ripe moon –
my pale hands
in the berry bushes
зрела месечина –
моите бледи дланки
во малините— Elena Naskova, English/Macedonian
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lumière d’aube –
rien d’autre
dans la toile d’araignée
.
dawn light –
nothing else
in the spider’s web— Damien Gabriels, French/English
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Another online journal. Very minimalist, but very high quality. Twenty tanka, one to a page, click on through and enjoy yourself.
.
years of buttons
in a glass Ball jar
the blue one on the top
so far from the blue one
on the bottom
.
.
This also counts as Dead Tree News, because it’s a print journal only. And a really nicely done one — glossy covers and paper, and lovely ink illustrations. More journals should have illustrations. In my humble opinion. Someone get on that.
(Oh, it’s all tanka, did I mention? And Australian. But you probably could have guessed that from the name.)
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when what might happen
happens
the earth is turned
as if the planting
might begin again— Kath Abela Wilson
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The shortest night of the year has started. I’m tempted to see it through. Skip the dreams for once. Try making my own.
.
what dreams may come…
black ink dripping
from rain-soaked leaves.
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.
.
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summer stars
even brighter
through the moon roof
.
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.
.
Hi all,
Forgive me if this edition is a little light. I’m running around getting ready to drag my son on a week-long two-thousand-mile college tour, because apparently while I wasn’t looking he outgrew his footie pajamas and learned to drive and do calculus and now he’s ready to light out for the territories. But I didn’t want to leave you hanging without any news from the Haikuverse until I get back.
While I’m out and about I’m planning to briefly abandon my family and drop in on the annual Haiku Circle gathering in Northfield, Massachusetts. I’m really excited about this because I’ll get to meet a whole new set of haiku poets than the wonderful Midwestern set I already know. I love being able to put faces and voices and personalities to the names of the poets I read, and I love that the haiku community is so small that it is actually possible to meet and hang out with most of the poets whose poetry makes your heart skip several beats when you read it. Maybe I’ll drop you a line from the action on Saturday.
Okay, let’s get on with it. I still have maps to print out and stuff…although not sure why I bother, I’m gonna get lost anyway.
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Haikai of Note
What’s everyone been writing lately? Anything good? Is the coming of warmer weather inspiring to you or does it just make you want to go to the beach and read stupid novels and forget about subtle Japanese poetry for a while? Personally, I think I tend to write more in the winter, when it’s dark and cold and there’s nothing else to do. All this bright light is distracting.
There’s still plenty of good poetry appearing every day on the Interwebs, though, so apparently everyone isn’t affected in the same way I am. Here are some of my favorites that have showed up since the last edition.
.
.
Milky Way . . .
the way the cow path
rings a hill— Michele Harvey, DailyHaiku
.
.
mare’s tail
yeah, sometimes
i still think of you— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
.
.
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水飲んで天上くらき夏あした 酒井弘司
mizu nonde tenjyõ kuraki natsu ashita
.
drinking water
a dark ceiling
of a summer morning— Hiroshi Sakai, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
.
.
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shooting star –
between dreams
reality— Stella Pierides, Stella Pierides
.
.
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white and purple –
the scent of lilacs
is a ladder too— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, scented dust
.
.
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pear blossoms . . .
which one of these houses
was yours?— Laura Garrison, DailyHaiku
.
.
.
interlocking tiles
two mockingbirds
share a worm— Gillena Cox, Lunch Break (This is a wonderful haiga, check it out.)
.
.
.
strip-lit
in the headache
of a high-rise
I poke a gummed nib
into Keats’s Nightingale— Liam Wilkinson, nearaway
.
.
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Journaled
Haibun Today just released a really great issue for June, and I swear I am not saying that just because I am in it. Some of my favorite from this issue: Colin Stewart Jones, “Should Rules Be Broken“; Steven Carter, “Montana“; Glenn G. Coats, “Expectations“; Katherine Cudney, “This World of Dew“; Bob Lucky, “Butter-Less in Ethiopia.”
Mu
There are so many haiku journals now that even people like me who actively seek them out and spend way too much time looking at haiku on the web anyway keep stumbling over journals that have existed, in some cases, for years, but that they (meaning me) never even heard of before. The terrifying thing is that most of these seemingly invisible journals are full of really good haiku, which makes you wonder if there is an alternate dimension that opens up periodically and releases clouds of haiku … or maybe there are just a lot of really good haiku poets in the world.
Anyway, my latest stunned discovery is the online journal Mu, which has its very first issue out, filled with great poetry like this:
fence line —
the flowers belong
to themselves— Jennifer Gomoli Popolis
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Web Wide World
Um, so I only have one article to share with you this week, but I think it should count for, like, ten. It’s a more-or-less mind-blowing article by Charlie Trumbull (current editor of Modern Haiku), published in Simply Haiku in 2004, called “An Analysis of Haiku in 12-Dimensional Space.” If the title makes your head hurt you should probably skip the article, but if you think it sounds like the coolest thing ever you should probably read it, because it more or less is. Set aside a little time though. And a little space in your brain. You’ll need it.
Basically, it’s what amounts to a mathematical or scientific analysis of the vast array of definitions of haiku that have been given by various commentators, owing a heavy debt to the work of research-biologist-cum-haiku-poet A.C. Missias, and incorporating several diagrams labeled “Highly Technical Figures.” But don’t let that scare you away. It’s also moving and thoughtful and funny, and I promise you don’t need any advanced scientific degrees to enjoy it, especially if you skip to the end where Charlie describes the relevant “12 dimensions” of haiku. What is your “Haiku ID”? Read and find out.
_____________________________________________________________
Dead Tree News
Just a little word from R.H. Blyth again this week. (I am gonna get through all four volumes of Haiku this summer if it kills me.)
One thing I desperately love about Blyth is that, unlike most commentators on haiku, he is utterly unafraid to compare and contrast haiku with Western poetry or even Western prose. People generally tend to emphasize how different haiku is from most Western writing, and of course in many ways it is quite different, but after all, Basho and Wordsworth (to name two of Blyth’s favorite writers) are members of the same species — it’s not like they have nothing in common. I think it can be too easy to get caught up in the myth that the Mystic East is a whole different world that runs according to alternate laws of nature or something. Blyth (although, yes, he does romanticize haiku in some ways) doesn’t fall prey to this particular myth.
I love this commentary of Blyth’s on a haiku of Issa’s, for instance, which has us all looking at the same sky:
assari to haru wa ki ni keri asagi-zora
Spring has come
In all simplicity:
A light yellow sky.— Issa, translated by R.H. Blyth
.
“We are constantly astounded at the simplicity and complexity of Nature. An infinite number of phenomena, and we call it by a single word, spring. Spring, in all its variety, is contained in a single phenomenon, the thinness of the colour of the yellow sky. This colour is commonly found in the evening sky; it is to be seen in a well-known colour-print by Hiroshige, small billowing clouds on the horizon. This ‘yellow’ is probably the ‘green’ of Coleridge’s verse:
The green light that lingers in the west.”
— R.H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 2, p. 38
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Okay. The oil’s been changed in the car, we’ve got someone to feed the cats…what am I forgetting? Oh yeah! (Waves frantically) Bye everyone, see you next week!
So. It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. (That’s a line from some song we sang at our third-grade choral concert. Amazing that I still remember it.)
This is how long it was: Have you ever had one of those dreams where the whole time you knew something really great was about to happen, something really fantastic you could hardly wait for, and the dream went on and on and all kinds of other humdrum, boring things happened, and you were thinking, “Okay, isn’t it about time the really great thing happened now?”, and then it was just about to happen, oh man, and … you woke up. And it never happened.
Yeah. I was seriously afraid this winter was going to turn out to be like one of those dreams. There was the cold. And the snow. And the more cold. And the unrelenting brownness and grayness. … Did I mention the cold? All through March. All through April. Into May. May!
Everyone else in the world (it seemed) was writing these cheerful blossom haiku and I kept looking out my window wondering if this was one of those dreams after all. Cold rain. Bare branches. Me shivering in my sweaters and occasionally even long underwear still, the grass like straw, the cold! so painful it felt like some kind of bone disease! (Should I go to the doctor?)
Well. So okay, it was still only about fifty degrees today with a stiff breeze. But there was sun! There’s supposed to be sun all week. And there are flowers everywhere. There are blossoms! There are lilacs! The grass is green, the leaves are green. …It finally happened!
Not only that, but I handed in my last assignments of the semester last week. Another thing I thought would never happen. And my son finally got his driver’s license, which means I don’t have to drive him everywhere anymore. [Though he will kill me if I don’t mention that he’s been getting himself practically everywhere on his bike since he was like ten, so it’s not like I’ve been a slave to his transportation.]
And my husband finally got over whatever microbial infestation had him in its death grip for the last month, so he can do something besides sit around making exploding-lung noises. Like take me to the Arboretum to look at apple blossoms. And wait patiently while I scribble illegible things about them in a notebook. Cold and lonely no more. So glad that dream is over.
.
falling in love with a memory apple blossoms
.
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Haiku of the Month: All Spring and Summer, All the Time
I’ve mentioned before how you can follow the world’s weather patterns by observing the haiku that is posted on the Internet. Well, I was looking through all the haiku I had collected over the last three weeks and noticed that not a single one referred to autumn or winter. (I must not have been hanging out on enough southern hemisphere blogs or something. I apologize to that half of the globe.)
.
.
.
river sunrise
a girl’s shadow
swims from my ankles— Lorin Ford, Mann Library’s Daily Haiku
.
.
.
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as it lands
the mallard shatters the house
in the river— Polona Oblak, Crows & Daisies
.
.
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migrating geese
the shapes of chins
in a crowd— an’ya, DailyHaiga
(Please go visit this very lovely haiga.)
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spring dusk –
the river pauses
for a moment
to take the weight
of a swan— Paul Smith, Paper Moon
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twilight
settling on all
the unfound eggs— Pearl Nelson, Pearl Nelson
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Palm Sunday
a card game called
‘doubt’— Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
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summer rain I’m still a fool around gravity
— Johannes S.H. Bjerg, scented dust
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.
.
.
a careless butterfly:
lost among thousands
of heavy raindrops— Vladimir Devide/haiga by Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
.
“The typhoon rain seems to have stopped this morning here, but the clouds are still pretty heavy. People walking on the street are taking umbrella along. Small insects, however, are sometimes careless and venture into the pouring rain only to be slapped down on the ground.
I heard that when the tsunami was approaching, quite a few people actually went out to the pier or seaside to watch the wave. How careless I thought, but I guess that is what happens when one underestimates the real power of the nature. Being curious and being careful are both the working of the mind. It makes a big difference which working one chooses in time of danger. I certainly choose not to be a careless butterfly.”
— Kuniharu Shimizu, see haiku here
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春寒の山のひとつがはぐれけり 齋藤愼爾
harusamu no yama no hitotsu ga hagurekeri.
spring chill
one of the mountains
goes astray— Shinji Saito, translated by Fay Aoyagi, Blue Willow Haiku World
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it has to end:
the wind
to cherry blossoms— Alegria Imperial, jornales
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.
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in tranquility
cherry petals are falling
abyssal fish
— Taro Kunugi, from Donna Fleischer’s Word Pond
.
.
.
secretly
still expecting
the living
that life owes me
– lupins !— Mark Holloway, Beachcombing for the Landlocked
(I had a hard time choosing between this tanka and several others Mark posted this week that were equally wonderful. You should really go over there and decide for yourself which is your favorite.)
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between tour groups
the garden
just the garden— Sandra Simpson, DailyHaiku
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.
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open scissors beside a vase of water
— Eve Luckring, from A New Resonance [6]: Emerging Voices in English-Language Haiku, Red Moon Press, 2009, quoted on Basho’s Road
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This is the toy theatre room. You’ll notice the wooden Lawyer. Took forty-two hours to get his jaw right. We’re staging Visions on Wednesday. You should come.— Ben Pullar, a handful of stones
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(You’re right, this is not a haiku. It’s a small stone, which is sometimes the same thing and sometimes not. You should let Fiona Robyn tell you about them if you don’t already know. And this reminds me — Fiona and her fiance Kaspalita, who are getting married on June 18, are asking for a wedding present of small stones written on their wedding day. They are lovely people and if you write them a poem I promise you’ll get some good karma. Shhhh. Don’t tell them I told you.)
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Web Wide World
So much fun stuff to read this month, so little time…
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“Understanding Modern English-Language Haiku” from Winning Writers, April 2010
This is a fascinating essay that features the editors of five haiku journals speaking about the process they go through when writing haiku in general and one specific haiku in particular. The introductory remarks feature a discussion of one of my pet peeves, how profoundly haiku is marginalized in the wider world of poetry and the serious ignorance and misunderstanding of what haiku is among mainstream poets.
It’s encouraging that this essay appears on a mainstream poetry website. I hope that the remarks of Jane Reichhold, John Stevenson, George Swede, Linda Papanicolau, and Colin Stewart Jones do something to enlighten at least a few writers about the real nature and potential of haiku.
cold night
the dashboard lights
of another car— John Stevenson
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Serendipiku
Speaking of Colin Stewart Jones…I got the link to that last essay off his blog, serendipiku, which is very interesting, as is his static website, also, slightly confusingly, called serendipiku. (It’s called branding, I guess. I must get with the times. Nice work, Col.)
Colin is a wonderful poet and artist. His one-word bird haiga are really fun, and I especially like his graphic haibun, which are unlike any other haibun you’ve ever seen. I recommend in particular “Menu” and “Burberry” and “Midsummer Moon.” The last, about insomnia, contains one of my favorite poetic lines of the month: “Can’t even conjure up a pathetic fallacy.”A possibly crippling ailment for some writers of haiku, probably including me.
secret promise…
almost thirty years now
since I was
the twelve-year-old boy
looking over a high wall— Colin Stewart Jones (originally published in Muse India 37, May/June 2011)
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Insect Haiku From the Shiki-School
You can download this unpublished manuscript from 1959, by Harold J. Isaacson and Helen Shigeko Isaacson, from the Internet Archive (an amazing collection of online texts, images, and audio which if you aren’t careful will suck you into its orbit and never let you go).
It’s an excellent collection of classical haiku about insects, with commentary. What makes it really interesting, though (to me, anyway, big geek that I am), is that the translations incorporate (untranslated, because they have no real translation) the kireji or cutting words (ya, kana, and keri) that the Japanese employ in many of their haiku for emphasis and/or as a way of marking a pause between the two parts of the poem.
Here are a couple of examples:
Ownerless
the helmet on which sleeps
a butterfly kana— Choi, tr. Isaacson
.Golden flies ya
Where on the ground has spilled
a melon’s entrails— Chikuba, tr. Isaacson
At first I thought this manner of translation was very strange and awkward and disliked it. But now I kind of like the rhythm it gives and feel that in some ways it helps me understand better what these poems must be like in the original. I wouldn’t want these to be the only translations I read of these haiku, but I think there’s definitely a place for them in the world. That’s my final answer.
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Women Poets of Japan from The Green Leaf
“The Green Leaf” has a lot on it, from mainstream poems by contemporary authors to classical haiku in translation to vast quantities of photo haiga to contemporary haiku to…the works of women poets of Japan, which is what I feel like featuring today because I just do, okay? The whole site, though, is well worth rummaging around in, though it feels incomplete and uneven (but who am I to talk) and also it does something which drives me completely out of my mind, which is fail to credit the translator of translated poems.
I hate this because it’s inconsiderate not only to the translator, who has done a very difficult job that deserves to be acknowledged, but to readers who might like to know where they can seek out (or, ahem, avoid) other translations by a particular translator or compare translations between translators. So I was feeling a strange mixture of annoyance and delight as I browsed around here. But then I came upon this tanka and forgave everything.
Gazing across the fields,
at Taketa I hear the cranes
ceaselessly crying:
not a space not a moment
of pause in my longing.— Lady Otomo-no-Sakanoue (8th century)
(There’s a haiga of this poem, too, if you follow the link from the poet’s name above.)
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So Jane Reichhold has done it again. Last year when I was just getting started writing haiku I used Jane’s list of 24 haiku-writing techniques to help me understand what haiku were all about and all the different ways they can be written. You can find her list here on the web and also in her excellent book, Writing and Enjoying Haiku.
Jane is great at explaining how haiku work and breaking down the process of writing them in a way even a more-or-less clueless newbie can understand, as I can attest. She does have her own particular understanding of what haiku are, which is not necessarily everyone’s understanding, but hey, who doesn’t.
Anyway, what she’s done now is create this series of fourteen quite brief lessons that take a beginner through the process of learning what a haiku is, what the various parts of a haiku are, what a good haiku looks and feels and sounds like. You could do way worse as a beginner than start with these lessons and their exercises. I really like this one, for instance:
“Find a haiku that you really admire and write it [down]. It would be kind to the author to record his or her name and where you found the poem.
Then begin to rewrite the poem. Maybe start by just changing one word. Or changing one line. Or take a phrase of image you greatly admire and see how many ways you can make it work with other images.”
— Jane Reichhold, “Bare Bones Haiku, Lesson Two: Before Writing Your Own Haiku“
(Disclaimer: Obviously, this is just an exercise for your own poetic development — you wouldn’t want to try to publish the results of this exercise or pass them off as your own poetry unless they ended up really, really, really different from the originals.)
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The Haiku Foundation Contest Archive
Once again The Haiku Foundation has created a very cool resource for readers and writers of haiku, which is this archive of past winners of most of the major haiku contests. If you are looking for an online collection of excellent contemporary haiku, needless to say this would be a good place to start.
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This is an older (2001) essay by Florence Vilen, discussing when and how repetition makes haiku more effective. Most of the essay is taken up by examples, which really is my favorite kind of essay. And haiku with repetition are some of my favorite kind of haiku, so this made me very happy.
the sound they make
the sound I make
autumn leaves— Gary Hotham
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Dead Tree News
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tea’s aftertaste,
by Aubrie Cox,
graphic design and illustrations by Katie Baird,
published by Bronze Man Books ($12)
(ordering information).
So you wanna see the most adorable haiku book ever published? Do you? Do you? You do? Yay! Okay…here’s the cover:
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Yes…that is a hand-sewn Japanese binding in red thread, thanks for asking. And that is a tiny little sketch of the moon reflected in a teacup. I did say it was adorable, didn’t I?
… Not sold yet? Looking for some more substance? Okay, here are a couple of the inside pages:
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… I know, right? All the pages are like that. Aubrie’s haiku are amazing, and Katie’s illustrations are awesome, and you just keep looking through the book going, “Why don’t more people write more haiku that so movingly combine the personal and the universal, that are filled with such astute and original observations of the concrete world, that are simultaneously mercilessly honest and lovingly generous?… And then why don’t they have an artist with the same rare sensibility draw touching little illustrations to go with their haiku… And then why don’t they put the whole thing together in a lovingly designed package and sew it up with red thread?”
It’s a mystery, really. But I wouldn’t spend too long agonizing over it. Just get the book and enjoy it. You’re welcome.
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Sigh. No matter how much I write it always feels like I’m forgetting something. If you figure out what it is, let me know, okay? I’m getting old, I need help with these things.
what I meant to say
still folded into
unopened blossoms
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May Day
every nest
has a voice
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anniversary new cells in my writing hand
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Beltane
in the rear-view mirror
a faraway fire
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A year ago today I started this blog. I’d written a few haiku over the previous few days — something I’d practically never done before — and for some reason felt that they needed to be inflicted on the world. And that I needed to write more — every day, in fact — and inflict all those on the world as well.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe it was something to do with it being May Day, which has always seemed like one of the year’s pivotal days to me. Well, it is, of course. In the Japanese conception of the seasons, this is approximately the day that summer begins. (It ends, of course, in early August, when you first begin to sense that melancholy in the air. You know that melancholy? The Japanese love that. They call it autumn and get all weepy and happy. Me too.)
This was also true of European cultures until fairly recent times, which is why we call the summer solstice midsummer. The first of May went by a variety of names for the pre-modern Europeans: Beltane, Walpurgisnacht. It was about purification, fertility, all that useful stuff. There were bonfires to symbolically cleanse things, and dancing to get sexy. The harvest was going in, the thaw was finally complete, the layers of clothes were coming off…time for a party.
Here in southern Wisconsin, and also in southern New England, where I was raised, May is the month when you finally feel like you can breathe easy, because now there’s practically no chance that there will be any more significant snowfall or lengthy cold spells until November. (Practically no chance, I said. This year, I wouldn’t put it past May to dump a blizzard on us or something.)
So for those of us around here who spend most of the winter weeping quietly in a corner, the beginning of May is the time when we creep out of our corners and put away the boxes of Kleenex and admit that, just possibly, life might be worth living. New projects start to seem as enticing as new clothes.
Hence, I suspect, my more or less insane undertaking of last May 1. I remember feeling a sense of great satisfaction at seeing my first post go up, with that big “1 May” on it. It made the whole thing seem much more real than all the previous times I’d started blogs, on whatever forgettable days I started them on. And right from the beginning, this blog felt different than all those other blogs, which lasted only until I figured out that I didn’t actually have anything to say, typically after three or four days.
Writing haiku, I found, especially once I started to figure out what haiku actually were, made me feel like I did in fact have something to say, that there was actually an infinite universe of things to say, because, of course, there is an infinite universe — and if you keep your eyes open you will always be able to observe something worth observing, and worth telling someone else about.
I still feel like that. I sometimes go crazy, in fact, from the number of things there are to say about the world in haiku. Not that I have really figured out how to say them well most of the time, but that challenge is always there. Those possibilities delight me. The whole world, passing by in a predictable but novel-seeming cycle year after year, trip after trip around the sun — how could that ever not be enough for anyone to write about?
Haiku can be thought of as time-tellers or time-markers — a large part of their original function was to announce the season that a particular string of linked verse was beginning in — and now that I have spent an entire year with haiku, have written all the obligatory leaf-falling and snow-falling and blossom-falling verses, have marked all the changes of the moon, and come back around to the beginning, that aspect of their nature is beginning to intrigue me more than ever.
The year is a cycle; it’s good to know when you are in it. It’s also good to know when you are in your life. When was before this? When’s after it? Most importantly — when is now? Writing haiku — I won’t say always, because I never say always, and I reserve the right to change my mind about everything — is a way of saying: I was here, then. That was now. And since time keeps flowing, there is always another now to write about. I feel very lucky about that.
*
Thanks for hanging around with me this past year and listening politely while I wandered around babbling incoherently. I appreciate it immensely. I mean, no matter how great I thought haiku were, I doubt I would have kept writing a blog that no one ever read or commented on. Or one of those blogs where people are always arguing and yelling at each other.
Fortunately, instead of one of those sad, dysfunctional-family kinds of blogs, I have the kind of happy-family blog that is constantly filled with the pleasant voices of many kind visitors. It never feels like work to hang out here. Practically everything else feels like work, but not this. (She says, staring gloomily at the pile of end-of-term projects that she’s way, way behind on.)
I have some vague thoughts for fun things we can do together this summer. But right now, I’m a little too busy and sleep-deprived to form these thoughts into coherent ideas, let alone coherent words. Give me a couple of weeks, okay?
Happy May Day. Go build a fire. And do a little dance. Come on, you know you want to.
summer dusk —
the boys emerge
with robots
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(haijinx IV:1, March 2011)
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For a fun time, you should all dial up the latest issue of haijinx. It was just sent out into the ether to seek its fortune yesterday, packed full of juicy and irresistible stuff. And I say this not just as someone who helped write it, but as an avid reader who is deeply impressed with the amazing work of all the contributors and of my fellow editors.
There are something like 36 pages of wonderful haiku, haibun, and haiga, there is phenomenal artwork by Kris Moon, there is a great writeup by Aubrie Cox telling you everything you ever wanted to know about NaHaiWriMo, there are reviews and articles galore. It’s nicely laid out, I love the color scheme, and it’s filled with great vibes because some incredibly nice people put it together.
Mark Brooks, our fearless leader, should get some kind of Herding Cats Award for spending the last couple of weeks chasing down the contributions of recalcitrant editors like, um, me, and forgoing vast quantities of sleep making sure every last detail was perfect and that his news editor didn’t get Newfoundland mixed up with New Zealand. (Look at how similar those names are, just look at them!)
I’m not going to quote anything from the issue here (well, except for my haiku above) because I don’t want anyone to think they can get away with skipping visiting it themselves. Go get a cup of tea, or pomegranate juice or absinthe or whatever it is cool people are drinking these days, and put up your feet for an hour or so and forget about the strange noise your car is making and the way it never seems to stop raining now that spring is finally here. There is poetry in the world. Do yourself a favor and read it.
Red Dragonfly 